This lunchtime talk was open to the MIT community, and I may
have been one of the few people there who was not a student, research fellow,
MIT archivist or media lab employee. It
was not aimed at the end user (me, the genealogist) but at the developers and
designers of the computer platforms and technology that drives our online
experiences. This discussion was a
behind the scenes peek (for me) at the problems, hurdles and headaches of
archiving 12 billion pieces of paper and electronic records, and making some of
them safe for long term storage, and some of them also accessible to the
public.

At this meeting were Michael Moore from the NARA facility in
Waltham, MA, and his “boss”, Bill Mayer who is the head of Executive Research
Services for all of NARA. The main part
of the presentation was by Pamela Wright, who used to be NARA’s Chief Digital
Access Strategist (their social media guru), but is now the Chief Innovation
Officer. This department was formed in
October 2012.

The first item that I found to be great news was that there
are Regional Residency Fellowships available at the 6 NARA facilities around the USA. See the website for details. Wouldn't that be a wonderful way to fund some solid genealogy or local history projects? This is a $3,000 stipend to assist with
travel and research expenses for the completion of a research project which
results in a publishable work. You must
work fast, the deadline for proposals is March 15, 2013. The Boston/Waltham facility is one of the
fellowship locations on the list.

Next, I found out that NARA’s website “Today’s Document” and the mobile apps for this were their first foray into social media in 2009. This was the very first app I got for my
iPhone three years ago, quickly followed by Twitter, Facebook and Ancestry (in
that order). Pam learned that to make it successful she needed to have it on many platforms, including Tumblr. David Ferreiro, the US
Archivist at the head of NARA then asked Pam, “Where do you go when you go on
line?”, and she knew that Google and Wikipedia were at the head of her
list. She hired a “Wikiepedian in
residence” for NARA. He was a Simmons
Library School Graduate. He put hundreds
of thousands of NARA images online.
Their presence online grew tremendously after this.

Check the website for the Citizen Archivist dashboard. This was designed to leverage the willingness
and participation of the public (crowdsourcing) to help get useful information about documents online. There are several places here to assist NARA with
online scanned images of documents, including “You can Tag It”, to add tags to
images and records partnered with Flickr and the online NARA catalog, and also “You
can Transcribe It” to help transcribe documents at beginner, intermediate and
advanced levels. No log in is necessary,
so there is no barrier to participation.
They also plan some challenge competitions as they venture towards more
public help.

These last two places for the public to get involved
reminded me of the chance we all had to help transcribe and index the 1940
census. If you enjoyed that experience,
this would be very similar.

The end of the meeting dwelt on describing the data sets
that would eventually be available and open to the public, including government
email, taxes, military and other electronic documents. There are sets of old data in unstructured
form from platforms 30 to 40 years old that must be manipulated to new
platforms. Format obsolescence is the
key word here. After librarians dealt
with paper documents in the same way for 6,000 years, now they have 60 years of
bit stream to archive and keep relevant.
Pamela Wright explained that paper has preservation and access issues,
but with electronic records access equals preservation. (Data tends to stays up to date if
that data is still available to users in a relevant way.)

This is what greeted me as I got off the
elevator at the MIT Media Lab-
legos, foozeball and strange sculptures!

Please see the MIT blog for more details. I understand that the meeting was videoed,
but it is probably for MIT use only. I asked Pam Wright if she or any other NARA staff would be present at RootsTech 2013 in Salt Lake City, and she did not know.

This is wonderful, to hear about all this intelligence and money being directed towards helping the public have access to online records. Before the last decade, we could never have dreamed that this would happen. Thanks for this post, Heather!

I just wanted to let you know that this blog post and your blog post "Was Your Ancestor A Mason?" are listed in today's Fab Finds post at http://janasgenealogyandfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2013/03/follow-fridayfab-finds-for-march-1-2013.html

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About Me

Author of the Nutfield Genealogy blog and occasional genealogy speaker. My family research includes Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, with a smattering of Nova Scotia. Please contact me if you see your ancestors on this blog. I would love to share information. I am the former secretary of the New Hampshire Mayflower Society, former President of the Londonderry Historical Society, member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the Mass. Society of Genealogists, The National Genealogical Society, and the New Hampshire Society of Genealogists.